semantic drift: popup; deconstruct

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On Sat, Feb 23, 2008 at 1:54 PM, Jonathan Lighter
<wuxxmupp2000 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>  In front of me is a special-issue magazine called _100 Greatest War Movies_ (ed. Gene Santoro,
> Leesburg, Va.: Weider History Group, 2007).  It seems to target a middlebrow readership
>
>   The cover blurbs announce, among other things, "191 popups" - meaning brief sidebars - mostly
> of fewer than thirty or forty words - printed in boxes to resemble computer popups. They're often
> superimposed over photographs to look even more like annoying online popups. Wow. I've never
> been so excited.

The model here is no doubt the VH1 show "Pop-Up Video", which sought
to enliven music videos with "info nuggets"...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pop-up_Video

I've seen this type of "pop-up" information as a special feature on
various DVD releases of films.


--Ben Zimmer

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